Picture a car version of yourself. Maybe you're a Ferrari, all brains and sleek lightness. Maybe you're a Jeep, capable of traversing the world and doing anything. Or maybe, just maybe, you're a crappy Renault built in Wisconsin. The 1980s sure were a promising time.

To be fair to this ad, Turbo Teen was one of the greatest shows of all time, and anything that remotely brings it to mind just in time for Saturday morning cartoons should be lauded:

To be unfair to this ad, it's for the Renault Encore.

The Encore was a result of a partnership between two historic brands that were on their last wobbly legs during the Reagan era. AMC was teetering towards bankruptcy, and in a desperate move to stay afloat it went out and got a $90 million loan from Renault. The French automaker, in turn, took a stake in the company and started building the Alliance and the Encore at AMC's plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The Encore wasn't all bad, as it was smooth and refined. It was just completely, utterly gutless, featuring 64 horsepower in the base model. That's fine on European city streets, but for the open American road it wasn't exactly adequate. And there wasn't a Renault 5 Turbo sold over here as a halo car to make you feel any better, either. The Renault/AMC market share never went much above 1%.

So if you're a Renault Encore, people generally consider you an alright bloke, if a bit slow and cheap, with a tendency to fall to pieces very, very quickly.

Then again, you apparently do get that snazzy red jacket. And those snazzy black aviators. Who wouldn't want to be a Renault Encore?